Hillary Clinton & Women's Rights: Why We Still Have Far To Go

Hillary Rodham Clinton is the guest-editor of our Volume IV issue, on newsstands nationally December 5. She will keynote at the first-ever Teen Vogue Summit in conversation with actress, scholar, and activist Yara Shahidi. The Teen Vogue Summit will take place on December 1 & 2 in Los Angeles. Tickets and information are available here.

The world is and always has been rife with inequality—one of the more painful truths of the human condition— and all too often, women have borne the brunt of that
inequality. In 1995, Hillary Rodham Clinton declared that “human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights” in her landmark speech at the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women. She spoke eloquently and passionately about the rights of women throughout the world and how in cultures where women thrive, everyone thrives.

This speech was both groundbreaking and heartbreaking. The moment was, many of us hoped, a turning point when people throughout the world might finally recognize that women are as worthy of humanity as men and put that recognition into action. The speech was heartbreaking because in 1995, the rights of women still needed to be asserted. We could not take for granted that women deserved to be treated as human. And though it went unsaid, we could not forget that some women have always been considered more human than others.

THE YEAR IS 2017,
AND WOMEN HAVE NOT
YET ACHIEVED
EQUALITY AND EQUITY
IN THE UNITED STATES,
NOR THROUGHOUT
THE WORLD.

The 19th Amendment, guaranteeing American women the right to vote, was ratified on August 18, 1920, but that right was granted primarily to white women. It wasn’t until 1965, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, that all women were truly granted the right to vote. All too often this fact is omitted when we talk about women’s suffrage. One painful truth that has dominated throughout history is that all women were created equal but all are not treated equal. We still cannot take the humanity of women for granted. The year is 2017, and women have not yet achieved equality and equity in the United States, nor throughout the world. In fact, nearly every time women advance, there is some kind of retrenchment as men try to continue hoarding the power they have amassed and wielded so carelessly.

Given Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States and the ways in which he is trying to dismantle both Barack Obama’s legacy and all the progress the world has made toward universal equality, we need to boldly assert the human rights of everyone with a particular emphasis on everyone who is not a heterosexual, middle-class or wealthy, cisgender white man. We need to loudly and openly state that civil rights are human rights. These statements need to be made not just by public figures like Hillary Clinton. They need to be made by each and every one of us in our day-to-day lives.

We can no longer turn a blind eye or a deaf ear to the ways great and small that people in our communities, workplaces, and even families deny the humanity of the
marginalized. The rights of people of color, immigrants, the LGBT, the disabled, the poor and working class, the neurodiverse, anyone who is marked somehow by difference, are human rights. As we are making these statements, we need to act in ways that demonstrate an inclusive understanding of humanity through activism, protest, voting, civic engagement, and how and where we spend our money because in a capitalist society the necessity for a financial imperative to create change is prevalent. And we need to continue to raise the bar for what we consider groundbreaking and important from those we look to for moral and political guidance. Acknowledging our humanity is the bare minimum our leaders can do. Instead, we should ask our leaders how they mean to honor our humanity, now and always.